De Blasio on Daughter’s Video: ‘She Wanted to Tell Her Story’

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio said on Sunday that his family has been overwhelmed by the reaction to a video in which his daughter, Chiara de Blasio, talks about her struggle with drug and alcohol abuse.

“Since it was released, people all over the world have responded,” he said during an unrelated news conference in which he announced the appointment of a new corporation counsel.

“She wanted to tell her story, and she wanted people to hopefully learn something from it, to be inspired by it,” Mr. de Blasio said of Chiara, who is 19 years old. His transition team released the video on Christmas Eve.

The Democrat, who takes office Jan. 1, declined to discuss the details of his daughter’s battle with addiction but said he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, paid for the video. He also declined to directly answer a question about whether he ever considered dropping his bid for mayor because of his daughter’s addiction.

“Chirlane and I, in everything we’ve done, have tried to make sure that we’re always thinking first about our family,” he said. “But the sum total of this is our daughter has done something absolutely extraordinary in her own life.”

In the video, Chiara de Blasio, who says she completed treatment in an outpatient facility in New York City this year, described how her addiction began to unfold.

“I kind of just kept like, reasoning and like using this really fake rationale that was so justified to me, that I could keep doing this stuff and be like, ‘Oh I won’t drink,’” she says. “And then I would just smoke weed, and then I would be like, ‘Oh I’m not going to smoke weed,’ and then I would just drink. It was kind of like bartering for equally bad outcomes.”

Chiara de Blasio, a sophomore at Santa Clara University in California, said that removing the substances from her life has “opened so many doors for me.”